The older brain’s broadband advantage

That maddening “senior moment” when the topic at hand slips away and you assume your brains are leaking out along with it? According to a growing number of studies, this gloomy assessment is wrong-headed. Instead, older brains are sifting through the store of information accumulated over a lifetime, filtering, placing information in context — and often coming up with a better answer or solution than younger respondents. Psychology professor Jacqui Smith sums up the result of these mental processes in a word: wisdom. “These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she says. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”

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One thought on “The older brain’s broadband advantage”

i’ll buy this . . . but sometimes doesn’t it seem as if the boomer generation is so obsessed with itself that it is now trying to re-define all of life’s metrics so that no matter how you slice it . . . it’s better to be a boomer?